Enigma

by Paul Bew

  Parnell was certainly very angry. He succeeded in cowing those who came to arrest him: Mallon ‘veiled his eyes deferentially’; a red-bearded fellow detective staggered and looked faint—so much so, in fact, that Parnell assumed at first he had been drinking but soon realised that it was ‘emotion quite unmixed’. Mallon, nonetheless, served the two warrants. Parnell looked over the documents which claimed that he was ‘reasonably suspected of having, since the 30th day of September, been guilty as principal in a crime punishable by law’. He then said: ‘All right, may I have a cup of coffee and write one or two letters.’78 One of Parnell’s letters was a note to Katharine O’Shea, which began:

  My own Queenie—I have just been arrested by two fine-looking detectives and write these words to wifie to tell her that she must be a brave little woman and not fret after her husband.

  The only thing that makes me worried and unhappy is that it may hurt you and our child.

  You know, darling, that on this account it will be wicked of you to grieve, as I can never have any other wife but you, and if anything happens to you, I must die childless. Be good and brave, dear little wifie then. Your own husband.

  Politically it is a fortunate thing for me that I have been arrested, as the movement is breaking fast, and all will be quiet in a few months, when I shall be released.79

  In the cab on the way to Kilmainham, Parnell grumbled about posting his letter: ‘Mr Mallon, you have deceived me.’ But Mallon kept his word. Outside the jail was a postbox and Parnell was allowed to use it. Later Tim Healy suggested that the authorities might well have retrieved the letters and read them. Mallon’s most recent biographer has concluded: ‘Mallon was certainly not beyond such tricks but, regardless, the letter to Kitty O’Shea was certainly delivered.’80 Parnell’s dislike of arrest burst forth again when the prison warders tried to search him. ‘How dare you!’ he cried angrily. Wisely the warders did not persist in their task.

  Chapter 4

  ‘A CERTAIN VALUE TO PARLIAMENTARY ACTION’

  I only attach a certain value to parliamentary action. I only look upon it as one of the forces which we can use for the purpose of gaining the rights of the country: but it is a force and an important force, and it is a force which should be developed and used to the best advantage. Some people have urged—the late Mr John Mitchel always urged—that the Irish members ought to withdraw in a body from the House and that the constituencies should refuse to send members. (Hear, hear) Well, I think there is a great deal in that contention, but I fear it is not a practicable one.

  PARNELL, SPEECH AT CORK, IRISH TIMES, 18 DECEMBER 1882

  1

  Within a few days of Parnell’s incarceration in Kilmainham the government also arrested his principal lieutenants after they had vehemently denounced the government’s action against their leader. The crisis deepened when the internees issued a ‘no rent’ manifesto which called for a universal strike against rents: a step which took the Land League close to open rebellion. As a result—and as Parnell probably hoped—the government suppressed the Land League. It is worth considering the language of the ‘no rent’ manifesto: even by Irish historical standards, the gap between real intention and superficial rhetoric is profound:

  One constitutional weapon alone now remains in the hands of the Irish National Land League. It is the strongest, the swiftest, the most irresistible of all. We hesitated to advise our fellow-countrymen to employ it until the savage lawlessness of the English government provoked a crisis in which we must either consent to see the Irish tenant farmers disarmed of their organisation and laid once more prostrate at the feet of the landlords, and every murmur of Irish public opinion suppressed with an armed hand, or appeal to our countrymen to at once resort to the only means now left in their hands of bringing this false and brutal government to its senses.

  Fellow-countrymen, the hour to try your souls and to redeem your pledges has arrived. The executive of the National Land League, forced to abandon the policy of testing the Land Act, feels bound to advise the tenant farmers of Ireland from this forth to pay no rents under any circumstances to their landlords until the government relinquishes the existing system of terrorism, and restores the constitutional rights of the people. Do not be daunted by the removal of your leaders. Your fathers abolished tithes by the same method without any leaders at all, and with scarcely a shadow of the magnificent organisation which covers every portion of Ireland today.

  Do not suffer yourselves to be intimidated by threats of military violence. It is as lawful to refuse to pay rents as it is to receive them. Against the passive resistance of an entire population, military power has no weapons. Do not be wheedled into compromise of any sort by the dread of eviction. If you only act together in the spirit to which within the last two years you countless times solemnly pledged your vows, they can no more evict a whole nation than they can imprison them. The funds of the National Land League will be poured out unstintedly for the support of all who may endure eviction in the course of the struggle. Our exiled brothers in America may be relied on to contribute, if necessary, as many millions of money as they have contributed thousands to starve out landlordism and bring English tyranny to its knees. You have only to show that you are not unworthy of their boundless sacrifices in your cause. No power on earth except faintheartedness on your own part can defeat you. Landlordism is already staggering under the blows which you have dealt it, amidst the applause of the world.

  One more crowning struggle for your land, your homes, your lives, a struggle in which you have all the memories of your race, all the hopes of your children, all the sacrifices of your imprisoned brothers, all your cravings for rent-enfranchised land, for happy homes, and national freedom, to inspire you—one more heroic effort to destroy landlordism at the very source and fount of its existence—and the system which was, and is, the curse of your race and of your existence will have disappeared for ever. The world is watching to see whether all your splendid hopes and noble courage will crumble away at the first threat of cowardly tyranny. You have to choose between throwing yourself upon the mercy of England and taking your stand by the organisation which has once before proved too strong for English despotism; you have to choose between all-powerful unity and impotent disorganisation; between the land for the landlords and the land for the people. We cannot doubt your choice. Every tenant farmer of Ireland is today the standard-bearer of the flag unfurled at Irishtown, and can bear it to a glorious victory.

  Stand together in the face of the brutal and cowardly enemies of your race; pay no rents under any pretext; stand passively, firmly, fearlessly, by while the armies of England may be engaged in their hopeless struggle against a spirit which their weapons cannot touch; act for yourselves if you are deprived of the counsels of those who have shown you how to act; no power of legalised violence can extort one penny from your purses against your will; if you are evicted, you shall not suffer; the landlord who evicts will be a ruined pauper; and the government which supports him with its bayonets will learn in a single winter how powerless is armed force against the will of a united, determined, and self-reliant nation.

  (Signed) Charles Stewart Parnell

  President, Kilmainham Jail.

  A. J. Kettle

  Hon. Secretary, Kilmainham Jail.

  Michael Davitt

  Hon. Secretary, Portland Prison.

  Thomas Brennan

  Hon. Secretary, Kilmainham Jail.

  John Dillon

  Head Organiser, Kilmainham Jail.

  Thomas Sexton

  Head Organiser, Kilmainham Jail.

  Patrick Egan

  Treasurer, Paris.

  18 October 18811

  Of course, the exciting language of the text has to be set against the leaders’ belief that the movement was hollow, wanting in solidarity, and thankfully on the verge of collapse. Parnell openly declared later that he never expected Irish farmers to pay ‘no rent’.2 It also has to be set against all the evidence that t
he costs of the campaign thus far were overwhelming the League executive. The reference to the tithe war of the 1830s was without any real meaning—except insofar as both in the tithe war and the Land League era there had often been a willingness to pay up to the authorities ‘at the point of the bayonet’ when resistance came under strong legal and state pressure. The tenants now were being thrown on their resources: either they sacrificed themselves in the ‘no rent’ cause, which was unlikely, or the League collapsed—the outcome tacitly accepted by all. Parnell’s clever sister, Anna Parnell, cannot have missed the way in which her brother had increasingly accepted her view that ‘rent at the point of the bayonet’ was, as a policy, a disastrous and expensive farce.3 The apparent radicalisation of the ‘no rent’ manifesto was, in effect, an organised retreat from an unsustainable policy. ‘No rent’ was never designed to succeed, it was designed to create a context in which Land League failures could be blamed on government repression; not bad leadership or flawed tactics, still less the nature of the Irish agrarian movement itself. Anna Parnell angrily subjected the ‘no rent’ manifesto to a devastating deconstruction: ‘The “No Rent” manifesto, which they issued from Kilmainham prison, was ostensibly a measure of retaliation for the . . . suppression of the Land League; in reality it was the only cover under which they could withdraw from the impossible position they had created for themselves, and at the same time keep up semblance of a continuous policy.’4 There is strong evidence to support Anna Parnell’s claim.

  Although his colleagues recorded his demeanour as calm, prison must have been an agony for Parnell. This was not because the regime was particularly harsh—the problem was the high level of tedium, like being stuck in an Irish nationalist version of a Victorian gentlemen’s club without a break for months at a time—but because Mrs O’Shea’s condition was increasingly a nervous and alarmed one. Parnell had to keep up a constantly reassuring flow of smuggled correspondence.

  However, the prospects for Parnell’s public life rapidly improved as he sat in Kilmainham. He had predicted that if he was arrested, ‘Captain Moonlight’ would take his place. Basically this prediction was to be proved correct. In the absence of an open political organisation, secret societies increased their activities in rural Ireland. This was not uncoordinated: as Parnell confessed to Davitt, the internees felt they were ‘obliged to strike back’.5 There is much speculation about Parnell’s actual state of knowledge about the actual organisational financial side of this ‘striking back’. The father of one of the most notorious of the Phoenix Park assassins, Joe Brady, told Frank Hugh O’Donnell: ‘Do ye think there could be 500 Land Leaguers in Kilmainham, with everybody free to see his friends, and not one of them to tell Parnell that brave men had their knives waiting to kill Forster and coercion?’6 For many months, from October 1881 to March 1882, Forster, the Chief Secretary and chief advocate of coercion, managed to convince his cabinet colleagues that his arrest of Parnell and the other leaders, together with the other strong measures undertaken by the Dublin Castle authorities, was bringing the crisis to an end. But there was other evidence pointing in a different direction. On 22 February Michael Davitt was elected MP for Meath (he was ineligible for election because he had not completed his prison sentence—a point of which his supporters were, of course, well aware). On 4 March 1882 the Spectator editorialised: ‘The news from Ireland is still very bad.’ It noted with some concern that ‘Meath, one of the richest counties in Ireland, large grass farms and tenants with capital, has returned Michael Davitt and that the no rent order is still obeyed in certain districts, the evidence of a change in the Irish character—a change for the worse—is still accumulating.’7 Forster was a humane man with a proud record of relief work during the Famine, and he desperately sought to persuade the Irish of his good intent. On 6 March, in a Tullamore speech, he talked of his distress during the Famine now being equalled by his distress when confronted with victims of League violence.8 This speech rallied English opinion, but not Irish.

  By 19 March 1882 the latest depressing batch of Irish outrage figures revealed beyond doubt that victory for Forster was still a long way off. On 29 March, when Forster only seemed to contemplate in parliament some future coercion, Gladstone sent him a worried note. Cabinet members began to think of using Parnell as a force for order in Ireland. The Spectator talked of the ‘Irish Jacquerie’: ‘It is not the prevalence of murder which is so annoying but the acquiescence of the people in the impunity of murderers.’9 The very desperation of the moment produced a passionate desire for a breakthrough. Liberals gossiped about what the Arctic explorers called a ‘lead of clear water’ amidst the almost hopeless ‘pack-ice of the Irish question’. Everyone, it seemed, was seeking a way out—senior Tories were turning their minds towards land purchase as the truly realistic Irish solution.10 The Liberals wanted to capitalise on the widespread tacit acceptance of the advantages of the 1881 Land Act which was now evident in rural Ireland. On 6 April Herbert Gladstone recorded in his diary: ‘Father . . . is accepting my view of the Irish situation, i.e. that the ‘No Rent’ manifesto has failed and that crime is more revolutionary in its character: and outrages committed to prove the government wrong in coercing.’11

  Not that Gladstone was without his ambiguities. On 6 April also, Gladstone wrote to Forster, following a call in the Pall Mall Gazette for Forster’s resignation. Forster’s step-daughter Florence recorded Gladstone’s assurance of continued support: ‘There is only one strong temptation, Mr Gladstone tells him, to accept his resignation, and that is that he would certainly have to go out with him. “He may rest assured that the idea of his removal has not crossed the mind of one of his colleagues.”’12 It may not be fair for Gladstone’s critics to see him as a conventional coercionist in 1881–2; but it is also unfair for Gladstone’s supporters to suggest that, somehow, Forster was on a solo run, a personal project in authoritarianism.

  Parnell was released on parole on 10 April 1882, having been given permission to attend his nephew Henry’s funeral in Paris. On his return from the funeral he visited Katharine who placed his dying child, Claude Sophie, born on 16 February, in his arms. This can only have increased his desire to get permanently out of prison and return to Katharine’s side. This was made very much easier by the increasing isolation within the cabinet of Forster and his policy of repression. The predicted improvement in social conditions in Ireland never seemed to materialise. Coercion was increasingly distasteful to the Liberal Party—especially now that it did not appear to be working. Gladstone was by late April ready to contemplate releases even if it meant the resignation of his Irish Chief Secretary, as eventually occurred on 2 May 1882. On the evening of 2 May 1882 Gladstone met Lord Derby. He insisted that the government had defeated the anti-rent agitation, but not crime: the government had ‘no doubt but that these outrages took place at the instigation of the Land League and he believed that, if the suspects were released, and proper legislation on the question of arrears, the influence of the League would be used to restrain them’.13

  The basis of the understanding Parnell reached with Gladstone is clear enough. It is laid out in a letter to Captain O’Shea, dated 28 April 1882, which was passed on to Gladstone. The government was to release the prisoners, would deal with the question of arrears of rent in a manner satisfactory to the tenants, and would amend the Land Act of 1881 in certain ways, notably by extending the benefits of fair-rent clauses to leaseholders—‘the flower of the Irish tenantry’, in Parnell’s phrase.

  Parnell made it clear that, if the arrears question were settled satisfactorily, then he and his friends would be able to limit outrages and intimidation. He did not press the leaseholders’ case with the same urgency. Nevertheless, he stated some years later that he had expected them to gain by legislation some time in the course of 1882, and not in 1887 as actually happened. However, Parnell rounded off his offer with a remarkable declaration: if the Land Act were adequately amended, this would, he said, be regarded by the country as a
practical settlement of the land question and would enable the Irish Party ‘to co-operate cordially for the future with the Liberal Party in forwarding Liberal principles and measures of general reform’.14

  Although some agrarian radicals denounced the basic outlines of the compromise, it is remarkable how broad-based its support was on the Irish side, embracing even such revolutionary figures as John Devoy. In 1891 an undignified squabble broke out between Parnell and the anti-Parnellites as to who had first raised the ‘white flag’ from within the walls of Kilmainham. John Dillon accused Parnell, and Parnell replied that William O’Brien had been the first to weaken. But in 1882 only the last plank of the 28 April letter—when it became publicly known—was the subject of genuine controversy. Gladstone’s response is noteworthy: ‘He [Parnell] then proceeds to throw in his indication or promise of future co-operation with the Liberal Party. This is a hors d’oeuvre which we had no right to expect. . . . I cannot help feeling indebted to O’Shea.’15 On 2 May Parnell was duly released; on the same day Forster resigned in protest. On 4 May Gladstone, to the surprise of many, appointed Lord Frederick Cavendish, younger brother of the Whig leader Lord Hartington, as Forster’s replacement. Cavendish—a former secretary to Gladstone, married to the Prime Minister’s niece—was clearly intended as a proxy to execute Gladstone’s personal policy. On 5 May Cavendish arrived in Dublin.